‘the image of Nature’
Into the Sublime: the Eidophusikon Reimagined is my reconstruction and reimagining of the iconic Eidophusikon, a milestone in theatre history. It was created by the 18th-century French painter Philip James de Loutherbourg RA, who served as a stage designer for David Garrick at Drury Lane, creating sublime stage effects that astounded audiences. The original Eidophusikon, widely regarded as a crucial forerunner to cinema, was a small-scale stage set that combined dramatic paintings, lights, gauze, coloured glass, and smoke to create scenic effects.
Into the Sublime follows de Loutherbourg’s plan of a five-scene performance while incorporating current contemporary art to explore de Loutherbourg’s alchemical concepts and ideas about nature, art and science, material work and the afterlife, and his vision of the Divine. The show I did at Swedenborg house is a section of Into the Sublime called ‘Scenes from the Journey of a Soul’
To follow the Alchemy Theatre project and the development of the Eidophusikon see www.artandmagick.blog http://www.artandmagick.blog
Collaborating Artists:
Liane Lang; Shannon Rakochy, Marwan ElGamal; Natasha Redina; Nazir Tanbouii; Anna Chiarini.
Performing the Eidophusikon: Jagoda N. Winter and Natasha Redina. Music by Takatsuna Mukai. Lights by diz_qo
How it Works:
Each image is divided into 6 separations then collaged as scenography
Here is an example of the artwork created for the Heaven sequence. The artist Marwan Elgamal and I talked a long time about what ‘Heaven’ is, and we agreed that it is something beyond our capability to truly grasp. So it needed to be abstract, beautiful but somehow ahuman.
What’s next?
showings and performances of the Eidophusikon in London and elsewhere.
Eidophusikon built in collaboration with Mark Fairhurst Bosco Designs and Robert Poulter New Model Theatre
